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Your cart is empty.The RD-08 brings you legendary Roland RD piano performance in a lean, mean keyboard that’s easy to carry. Our most affordable RD to date delivers no-compromise sound and playability for professional gigging, supported by an intuitive interface for fast navigation in the heat of the moment. And with the upgradeable design, you can add even more sounds and features as your needs evolve.
Zachary
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2024
Bought the RD-08 for gigging and for DAW work at home, love the action, it’s light weight and does everything I need it to when connected to a DAW.As a side note- another reviewer commented that you need to purchase a $300 upgrade to use the USB port to pass midi to a daw, that is false. I did not purchase the upgrade and USB over midi works just fine. Read the manual for the instrument, everything you need to know is in there to get this working. The upgrade is required to enable the USB Audio Interface, which is a separate an unrelated feature. USB over midi works out of the box.The drawbacks come in when you want to use this on its own. If you are not plugged into a PA or a monitor, you will quickly find the in-built speakers are extremely weak. Even in a 10x12’ room, they are not loud enough or clear enough to be useable.I purchased this with the RP-03 pedal set, which provides 3 linear 127 position pedals. The pedals are fantastic the MIDI reads into your DAW without any additional setup. Plug and play.The Supernatural Piano Engine as they call it, sounds good, and the linear sustain pedal graduates as you would expect with an acoustic piano, however I have not been able to find a way to get the Una-Corda pedal to work with the in built piano engine. It just doesn’t do anything. It’s reading the input, and as mentioned it passes through to a DAW just fine, but the SN piano engine just doesn’t seem to have support for it, which is exceptionally disappointing, as otherwise the SN engine sounds great.Long story short- if you’re pairing this with a DAW and a VST piano engine such as Pianoteq, with monitors you will love this instrument. If you are using it by itself, you will find it has significant shortcomings if you want to use this to play classical piano music. For the price, especially if you can get it bundled with a case I have no regrets and will be using this instrument for a very long time.
Mildred L. Herbert
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2024
Love the feel of the keys and ease of switching modes
funkendub
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2024
I love the sound of this but had to return it. Turns out you have to pay $300 more to activate the USB port and make this thing a MIDI controller (which was a secondary use for me, but really, $300?). I coughed up the upgrade price, though, as I did love this way this plays and sounds. But, typically Roland/Boss stuck-in-1999-software, the upgrade would not install. You have to use a USB drive to install it on the keyboard and that may have worked but I'll never know as the software installation on my M3 Mac was a complete failure. For pete's sake, you have to *restart* to install--or uninstall! This is the 21st century, Roland/Boss, and I'd have thought they'd have updated their software but this is exactly why, years ago, I swore I'd never by another Roland or Boss product that requires software. Besides, the $300 upgrade charge is literally hidden--they don't mention the price on Amazon or on the Roland product page. Really devious and unfair. I'd say.
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